Pancakes
by Finnhart
Summary: ONESHOT. It's his day off and Seto is stumbling along memory lane when he smells and hears some oddly familiar things. Kinda pointless but kinda cute. Please refer to author's notes inside - read & review!


**Author's Note: **A boring, little oneshot thingy to keep me in the mood for writing! Please refer to _Brown Paper Parcel _to understand who this 'Muhoshi' is.

**Disclaimer:** Seto, Mokuba and Roland are the brain children of Kazuki Takahashi, they do not belong to me.

**Warnings:** None.

**Summary:** _It's his day off and Seto is stumbling along memory lane when he smells and hears some oddly familiar things. _

* * *

**One Shot**

**Pancakes**

Seto realised that it was healthy to have a day off every other week or so and he took them to please Mokuba, who constantly jibed him, called him a workaholic and laughed raucously when he joked that his nii-sama would sooner marry his laptop than a lady.

Sometimes he was scolded for this, though mostly he was not. Seto recognised this taunting as a form of 'humour' perhaps, and thought it might benefit his younger brother (who was quickly growing up into a barely controllable teenager) in finding the path to normalcy. To be a funny little guy like all the other little guys he went to school with.

He sighed dramatically, already bored even though it was only nine o' clock in the morning. He'd been up and about for roughly two hours. Seven in the morning was a very long sleep-in according to Seto. He had debated long and hard with himself as to whether he was going to have black coffee or green tea for breakfast, but couldn't decide so he had a cup of each, expertly brewed by his head butler, Ralph.

Seto didn't know many others who drank coffee in any of its various forms. He had an espresso machine put into the senior staff lounge at the KC Tower and so far as he knew, Roland was the only one who regularly used it (who came to Japan from an upbringing in the West) and Campion, Roland's keen protégé, who would do almost anything to emulate his mentor. Seto suspected Campion didn't even like the bitter taste of the black liquid, and pondered why he would inflict its flavour upon himself anyway.

Seto didn't know why he liked coffee. To begin with he had only liked it if it had proper milk in it, which was difficult to get hold of in Japan, most of it being imported powdered stuff from the continent, so he bought a little cow – Momo – which lived in the pastures and stables with the few horses that he kept. Buying the cow had made a lot of sense at the time.

He could stand to drink the stuff black if he was desperate (he found this out when he pulled an all-nighter at the office and his little flask of Momo's milk had run out) but really, it was best with the milk in. He had no idea why, but the smell and taste made him feel secure, like he was at home, but somehow a home that wasn't the one he lived in. Perhaps the memory of a home, but he couldn't remember living in a cosy place that smelt of coffee.

He shuffled about in his pseudo-pyjamas, going through the rooms, looking for something to do that wasn't work related. Mokuba always shouted at him if he tried to do work on his days off. There was a long aquarium stretching down a corridor and he stopped to admire his goldfish.

Seto liked his goldfish a little bit too much. He had a grand total of eleven aquariums throughout his vast manor and not one held less than forty gallons of water. All of his fish were magnificent examples of their particular breeds; he had orandas, ryukins, ranchus, veiltails, phoenix-tailed eggfish – each of them a gemstone (and most almost as expensive as gemstones). He even had one aquarium for what he liked to call the 'retarded fish' (much to Ralph's chastising), the breeds that had been bred over time to have ridiculous protruding eyes or bizarre eye-sacs. They were ugly and funny to watch. Outside he had one large pond full of koi, wakin and jikin and an 'indoor' pond in the conservatory for his high-maintanance tosakins.

The corner of Seto's mouth flickered, the prevalent clue that he was in fact grinning widely on the inside. His goldfish depended entirely upon him. He enjoyed being their god.

Seto sniffed, he straightened to his full height and peered intently towards the kitchen.

_What is that smell?_

He carried on through the long corridor towards the kitchen, sniffing the air the whole time. It was so irritatingly familiar and yet he was absolutely sure that he had never smelt such a thing before in his whole life. On his way to the kitchen he passed by the large entertainment suite, where Mokuba was huddled on one of the large leather sofas in front of the sixty-inch plasma screen television, enthusiastically eating _okayu_ and broiled fish whilst somehow managing to flick through the channels with his foot.

'Morning.'

Mokuba's massive mop of hair whipped around.

'Hello Nii-sama!' He paused to rearrange his bowl in his lap. 'Did you have breakfast yet? I made too much _okayu_, you can have some. I hope you didn't just have some of that disgusting black stuff.'

Seto snorted. 'I will try to stomach some _okayu_. Maybe I will have cereal... did Momo get milked yet?'

But Mokuba wasn't listening anymore, he had found what he was looking for on the television and was completely engrossed.

'_Thunder! Thunder! Thunder! Thundercats, ho!'_

A loud sigh and Seto was on his way again, drawn towards the kitchen by that strange smell. It smelt like a memory, if that was even possible.

_What is it?_

It was his oba-chan, his Aunt Muhoshi*, cooking something at the stove with great flourish, her long black hair pulled up into a messy bun at the top of her head. Sasaki Muhoshi had been living in the manor with Seto and Mokuba for almost half a year, since she had arrived in Japan to seek out the lost children of her dead sister. She had announced her arrival by first sending a photo album to Seto, with old pictures of him and his parents in far happier times, before Death came to their doorstep. She had been living in the West, most of the time spent in Britain where Seto's mother and father (who was an Englishman) had been married and where Seto had been born. Since a war erupted in Europe, it was no longer safe for Muhoshi to live there, so she fled back to the motherland and sought after the mislaid remnants of her family. She had never explained why the blood family had banished her in the first place and Seto felt it wasn't wise to pry.

The first month or so of living together had been troublesome for Seto, who took a long time to accept that he still had some blood family that had not been a part of the reason why he and Mokuba ended up in the orphanage. It took him even longer to feel comfortable calling her oba-chan, rather than 'Muhoshi', which she hadn't liked at all.

'You can call me oba-chan, Seto-kun,' she would say. 'I am your oba-chan.'

He hadn't liked being called 'Seto-kun' either, but Muhoshi was intensely stubborn, even moreso than Seto at times, so it stuck.

'What are you cooking, oba-chan?'

Muhoshi turned and smiled warmly. She looked so very like her sister. Seto smiled in return as best he could. There had never been any women around in his childhood, Gozaburo's wife was an absent mystery, the orphanage had been boys only and as such was run by males. Not a single inkling of a mother-type had been there in his tumultuous journey called 'growing up'. Though he never voiced it, he had grown to enjoy having this aunt, the strong woman, in his life.

'I'm making pancakes, Seto-kun.'

Seto went to her side to look at the pan. She had a ladle in a bowl of some thick, parchment coloured liquid and was transferring it into the large flat pan, moving it around so that it covered the entire base. After a minute or so, she flipped it over with a spatula, then flopped it onto a mountain of pancakes sitting on a plate by the stove. She looked at Seto with a languidly amused expression on her face.

'Well, ___crêpe_s, if you want to get technical.'

Seto had no idea what she was talking about.

'Why are you making them? Mokuba said there was some _okayu_ left –'

'It's not very Japanese, is it,' she admitted vaguely, concentrating on pouring another ladle of the stuff into the pan. 'I ate these when I lived in Britain, long before they started rationing things like eggs and milk. You can put anything you like on them. You can have them sweet for breakfast or savoury for dinner.' She smiled sadly at the memories floating in her mind. 'I'm making a big batch, so we can have some tonight.'

Nose wrinkled and eyebrow furrowed, Seto leant in closer to better inspect the '___crêpe_s'. 'I don't think Mokuba will like them.'

Muhoshi scoffed incredulously. 'Don't be silly!' she exclaimed. 'These were one of your father's favourites; he must have made them for you a few times before he died'.

Seto froze, eyes wide. Finally it made sense as to why he recognised the smell. He scrabbled around in his head for a moment. 'Did chichi** drink coffee?'

'Oh yeas, he practically lived on coffee and tea. Well, the English idea of tea is quite questionable...'

Seto ignored Muhoshi's mutterings about English tea, rushing over to the counter in the middle of the kitchen where she had put some strange condiments he didn't know they even had, instinctively reaching for a green and yellow bottle and a small bowl of something white. He returned to his aunt's side, eyeing the growing tower of ___crêpe_s.

'Lemon juice and sugar? How very like your father. You must remember more about him than you first thought –'

'I want some now,' Seto said abruptly. Muhoshi stared, a little stunned by his brusqueness, then softened.

'Take as many as you like.'

* * *

Seto was sitting on the floor in front of the sofa where Mokuba was lounging. Mokuba peered at what Seto had on his plate, asking what it was, being told what it was but apparently not having the same blast of memory Seto had suffered. He tried some, liked it, then leant back, surfing the channels again.

He couldn't help but peer curiously at the back of Seto's head, wondering why he had chosen to sit on the floor instead of the left-hand corner of the massive sofa where he nearly always sat. He seemed quite faraway as well, bizarrely occupied by the strange food Muhoshi had made (which he had tried to eat with chopsticks, only to give up and use his hands instead).

He puckered an eyebrow and chewed his lip as he concentrated and finding something interesting to watch. Both he and Seto were fluent in English, so they had an awful lot of Western channels available to them, but Saturday morning television offered very little that he thought his brother would be able to tolerate. For a few moments the signal on the remote control got a bit lost, and they got stuck on a channel that normally played a peculiar mixture of cooking programmes and retro supermarionation shows. Mokuba saw Seto tense.

'_Five, four, three, two, one – Thunderbirds are go!'_

'Oh my god...'

'It's okay Nii-sama, I'll change it to something else in a second–'

'No!'

Mokuba blinked.

'No... leave it on. I – I remember this...'

Seto leant back, savouring his sugary, lemony pancakes and gazing almost starry-eyed at the stiff, overly-dramatic puppets on the screen.

Mokuba had never seen him quite so at ease. He smiled softly, and settled back to enjoy Thunderbirds with his big brother.

* * *

_*Please refer to the oneshot called 'Brown Paper Parcel' to learn more about the day when Seto first met his estranged Aunt Muhoshi._

_**Chichi = daddy._

_Okayu = a kind of rice porridge._

_Oba-chan = auntie._

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**Author's Note:** I pretty much wrote that in the amount of time it took for my risotto to cook, so it's probably full of mistakes. There's not much point to this really, other than to reinforce some of Seto's history regarding his parents that I came up with in_ Brown Paper Parcel._ I'm setting up a foundation to a new longfic that I plan to write soon. I hope it won't seem to contrived! Please review :)


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